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Pwning my favorite game

Hectoberfest part 2: Pwning my favorite game

While I have used various open source programs in daily bases, I have never imagined to be the one contributing to it. It has been the reason why I got interested in computer, so that was always my holy grail, but it was not until recently I could see myself as someone standing with the giants. Turns out, I can stand on their shoulders. What a view! Anyways, for my second PR, I decided to work on one of my favorite game:Cataclysm-DDA. It is about time my survivor got himself some rocket fuels!

Cataclysm - Dark Days Ahead

This is a rouge-like survival game. Your character is spawned in the middle of an unfriendly, zombie-infested world. Depending on the difficulty, you may spawn anywhere from a relatively safe bunker to neck-to-neck with the next-door, undead-and-hungry neighbors. The goal is to utilize every object and knowledge to gain an upper hand and survive. The player has the world at the disposal to craft and use.

Specific Issue

Rocket fuel is one of the consumable used in the game. It is relatively easy to learn with some limited purpose. The problem is that zinc, one of the components used to craft the chemical, spawns in only one location, school chem lab, that is often relatively difficult to reach until the player reaches much higher level. To provide a balanced game play, an issue was opened requesting to increase availability of zinc.

Approach

First, I looked up zinc. With the assumption that the world tries to closely mimic a real-life town, I wanted to know where we would find zinc in any form in our lives. After some search, it turns out, zinc is very popular in creating metal molds and used in many industries such as automobiles. In different chemical forms, zinc is also used in wide range of common products such as paint. With this information, I decided to add zinc to the hardware stores, Cataclysm world-wide. I also decided other chemistry-related locations may have zinc for various purposes, adding zinc to chem_home and chem_lab locations.

Alternative

As mentioned, zinc is a component in various items such as paint, and paint exists in the Cataclysm world. As chemical crafting plays a big role in the game, it would also be interesting to add a recipe that would turn paints or other object into zinc and other compound.

Conclusion

This was much easier fix but was an interesting general learning experience. Perhaps, for my next pull request, I might try to implement the recipe idea to increase zinc availability.
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